Quick Synopsis: When her infant brother, Mac, is abducted by a murder of crows, 12-year-old Portland teenager Prue McKeel launches a rescue mission into the Impassable Wilderness—a forbidden, magical forest

Despite what it may seem like, my review release dates actually do have some logic to them. If I watch a film on a streaming service, its review gets pushed to the back of the queue, with cinema releases taking priority so the reviews come out while people can still see the films on the big screen. There’s also a degree of thematic scheduling. I timed my reviews of Saipan and Balls Out (or Balls Up; I still can’t remember the title) to coincide with the World Cup. It’s Halloween week, and I have two horror movie reviews lined up (Ghosts: The Possession of Button House and Clayface), both of which are cinema releases and therefore need to be written urgently. The logical thing to do would be to write and publish those reviews today. Instead, I’m going with Wildwood. There’s a reason for that. I watched it yesterday, a Sunday, at a perfectly normal time to go to the cinema. Yet there were only three or four other people in the screening. This movie deserves better. Although, to be fair, if the cinema had been anything less than packed, I’d have said the same thing.

Laika have produced two of the best stop-motion films of all time: 2009’s “Now Damned By The Author” Coraline and 2016’s Kubo And The Two Strings. This is even better than both. There have been two Pixar movies released this year, and DreamWorks has given us Forgotten Island, the strongest movie they’ve put out in a long time. Wildwood is better than those too. I’m going to get straight to the point: this is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a long time.

It has everything I want and love in a movie: striking visuals, complex characters, a well-crafted world, humour, emotional depth, great performances, and a fantastic soundtrack. It’s not perfect, but it’s about as close to perfection as cinema has ever come. Spoilers: it’s already pretty much guaranteed to win “Best Film” at the end-of-year awards. I won’t even be able to pretend it’s a contest.

The flaws? The length may put some people off. Over two hours is a LONG runtime for a kids’ movie. Also, as much as I loved the pre-credits scene, I can see the argument that it undermines the villain a little. We’re given a brief glimpse of her backstory that explains her motives, then see her at her most evil, only for her backstory to be explored in greater detail later. And there’s one reveal that’s foreshadowed a bit too heavily. But those complaints are the cinematic equivalent of complaining because the free meal you just ate wasn’t big enough. They’re valid criticisms, but they’re so minor in the grand scheme of things that they barely make a dent in my enjoyment.

It’s hard to talk about this film honestly, because doing so means endlessly praising it. It’s shockingly violent for a kids’ movie, with army massacres that rival Saving Private Ryan. But these aren’t just faceless deaths or animated nobodies. You get the sense that every one of them is a person with a family, a personal history, and an unrealised future. That gives the deaths genuine weight and makes them all the more emotionally devastating.

On the subject of emotion: the villain’s backstory. Holy shit, is that something else. I don’t agree with her methods, but I can absolutely understand what drives her to act the way she does. Sympathetic villains are nothing new, but they’re rarely crafted with this much brilliance. The other characters feel just as real. There’s a governor who only appears on-screen for a few moments, yet even they have their own clear motivations and reasoning behind their actions.

The voice work is brilliant, too. I’ve always thought Carey Mulligan was great, but even by her usual high standards, this is superb. Just look at the cast list: Richard E. Grant, Angela Bassett, Mahershala Ali. That’s a stacked cast. Yet it’s Peyton Elizabeth Lee who takes the lead, and she’s incredible, giving Prue a personality that makes it impossible not to root for her.

The visuals are as beautiful as the characters themselves. I’m not going to lie and say something like “you almost forget it’s an animated movie”; you never forget that. And why would you want to? Everything you see onscreen feels like it’s been crafted with love and dedication. It’s taken over half a decade to bring these visuals to life, and not a second was wasted. The buildings feel real and lived-in, the characters feel alive, and the landscapes are lush and bursting with life. Look, they’ve made a stop-motion movie featuring battles with multiple characters and birds in flight. How can you not be impressed by something like that?

It’s not just emotion and seriousness that drive this film. It’s also really funny. The jokes about Oregon and its hipster culture are hilarious, but never feel mocking. You can tell they come from a genuine place of love and affection for the area and its culture. That connection to Oregon extends to the soundtrack, too. It’s not often that kids’ movies feature so much shoegaze and indie music, but it works brilliantly here. That probably helps explain why the soundtrack feels so fitting: the original book was written by Colin Meloy, frontman of The Decemberists, whose music features on the soundtrack, too. Prue’s fish-out-of-water nature and Curtis’s nervousness also provide plenty of laughs.

The world-building? It’s pretty damn good. The universe is full of enough hints about its history that you can imagine countless untold stories taking place within it. My one small criticism is that I don’t think enough emphasis is placed on the divide between the Impassable Wilderness and the human world. The characters seem shocked when an outsider appears, but the idea doesn’t feel all that impossible. There’s no obvious sense of a magical barrier separating the two worlds; it feels more like someone moving to Tunbridge Wells from Glasgow. Not impossible, just not something that happens very often.

In summary, Wildwood is so good that I changed my review release schedule for it. I’m not going to be subtle about this: you should go see it.